Marshall’s Weblog

Programmable Water - An MIT student creates logic gates that switch with the power of water.
NetLogo - A programmable modeling environment
Earth’s Hum - Earth’s Hum is explained by scientists as being caused by waves in the oceans. If you haven’t heard Earth’s hum, well, that is because you can’t. Only the most sensitive seismometers can [...]

[Read more →]

The other day I spent a good 45 minutes fixing a defect at work. A major portion of the time was spent trying to figure out why an object I was modifying wasn’t keeping a value for one of it’s properties. I threw the debugger into motion, stepping through the code multiple times only to [...]

[Read more →]

I just found out about a little math game called Four Fours. Basically what you try to do is try to represent integers using only the number 4 and a few common mathematical operators, for example:
0 = 4 - 4 + 4 - 4
1 = ( 4 + 4 ) / ( 4 + 4 [...]

[Read more →]

Quake 3 has a the following bit of code to calculate the inverse square of an integer.

The i = 0×5f3759df - (i >> 1); is the most curious part of the function, and apparently is has to do with Newton’s Method, which is an efficient way to approximate the roots of a function.
( via [...]

[Read more →]

A while back I had an idea for a web app whereby users would upload files to a server and the app would spit out a download key. Third party’s could then download the files only if they had the proper key. Today, I came across Civil Netizen, a free service which allows you to [...]

[Read more →]

Firebug — “FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.”
Hawkeye — [...]

[Read more →]

Tonight I set out to sync my iTunes library up with MythTV. I have been wanting to create some playlists on the Myth box, but I find the playlist “editor” (if you can even call it that) for MythMusic just a bit kluggy. I found the script that is embedded in this post which will [...]

[Read more →]